Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Incoherence, Hate Characterize Democrats' Response to Carl Paladino

Carl Paladino is spending a considerable sum of money to run for governor. The reason is that the government of New York is broken. The rate of emigration from the state is greater than the rate of emigration from Russia during the years leading up to the Bolshevik revolution, when my paternal grandparents fled to come here in 1904.

Once the world's capital of innovation, New York is now a center of failed government programs, waste and economic illiteracy, spearheaded by its now-irrelevant, less-than-mass media. The readership of the state's flagship newspaper, the New York Times, is less than the viewership of most cable television programs. Once the "Empire State", thanks to Rockefeller Republicanism, left-wing extremism, the Ochs Sulzbergers, Keynesian economists and Wall Street, New York has led the nation in the march toward a rigid two-tiered economy and economic desperation. Statist Democrats have shut down factories and taxed out productive New Yorkers, leaving special interests to fight among themselves for a pie that routinely decreases in size just as it routinely increased in size during the days of laissez faire capitalism.

Paladino is the first major candidate in my lifetime to seriously address a fraction of the many failures of Progressivism and the loot-and-spend system that has benefited college professors, school teachers, government contractors and social workers by manipulating a hoi polloi indoctrinated in ideological schools and institutions of higher indoctrination. This includes CUNY, my employer, whose faculty includes a ratio of Democrats to Republicans of about 40 to 1 and whose administrators such as the former provost of Brooklyn College have advocated politicization of education.

The Democrats' response to Paladino, who is calling for a meager 20 percent cut in government, combines hate with ignorance. In particular, Paladino has committed several politically incorrect faux pas including distasteful e-mails and remarks concerning homosexuals. All of us have our prejudices, including a distasteful anti-Christian prejudice I have detected in the less-than-mass media and among academics. Unlike Obama, who refused to criticize Reverend Farrakhan for anti-Semitic remarks, Paladino has emphasized that he does not hate gays and has apologized to gays. At no point did Paladino suggest that government enforcement of sodomy or related laws should be exercised. Hence, the entire issue is irrelevant to the gubernatorial race.

Since the entire issue is irrelevant to the serious problems facing New York State, it raises questions in my mind as to how seriously one may take Andrew Cuomo, the Democrats and the less-than-mass media. My conclusion is that the Democrats have no arguments against Paladino's, which chiefly concern the state's excessive government, its declining industrial base, its taxes, its massively overpriced Medicaid plan, the exodus of productive labor from the state and its overall economic decline. Instead, the Democrats, assuming that the hoi polloi, educated in Democratic-run schools, are idiots, emphasize filth and do not respond to Paladino's arguments. Much as the Obama campaign signaled the end of the mass media as we knew it, this election signals the end of political debate as it ought to be. The Democrats simply lack the intellectual tools to discuss issues that confront New York.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.